"Cary Kittrell" <cary at afone.as.arizona.edu> wrote in message
news:agvq1p$c37$1 at oasis.ccit.arizona.edu...
> In article <Y2lY8.59633$P%6.3955165 at news2.west.cox.net> "John Knight"
<johnknight at usa.com> writes:
> <
> <http://christianparty.net/timssl10.htm> <
> <Question L10 on the 12th Grade TIMSS Math test given to 12th graders
around
> <the world in 1995 reveals an astounding difference in math skills between
> <the sexes in all the countries who participated. The average difference
in
> <all countries was 8.3%, with 31.9% of boys and 23.6% of girls answering
> <correctly, but the difference in the US was 12.3% (14.9% of girls and
27.2%
> <of boys). In countries like Sweden where 59.8% of the boys answered
> <correctly, guesses on the test would not have influenced the scores by
that
> <much, but where only 14.9% of American girls answered correctly, guesses
> <must be taken into account.
> <
> <Since this was a multiple choice question with five possible choices, the
> <probability of getting the correct answer just by guessing is 20%. In
other
> <words, for every five students who guessed, one of them would have gotten
> <the correct answer by chance. The maximum score would have been achieved
> <had all the students who didn't understand the problem guessed at the
> <answer, so where 14.9% of American girls answered the problem correctly,
20%
> <of them would have gotten the correct answer if all of them had just
guessed
> <at the question. It's not clear how they managed to score lower than if
> <they had just guessed, but discovering why may go a long way towards
> <understanding what has gone wrong with American "education".
> <
>> Oh, it's trivially clear, isn't it? The composite score is derived
> from three fractional populations:
>> P1, who knew the answer cold
> P2, who thought they did -- incorrectly
> P3, who guessed
>> so obviously any given score may be described as:
>> P1 * 100 + P2 * 0 + P3 * 20
>> where P1 + P2 + P3 = 1.
>> You can only apply a correction for guessing across the board
> if you assume that P3 is one hundred percent of the test population.
> In point of fact the problem is under-determined, and so there
> is no way of to determine the relative sizes of P1, P2, and P3
> from the data given. You make an implicit assumption that all
> girls are members of P3, and this leads to subtracting a correction
> for random guessing to the entire population resulting in
> mathematical absurdities like your claim that in eight of
> the twenty-eight questions, girls scored less than zero.
>> Little speed bumps like "It's not clear how they managed to score lower
> than if they had just guessed", or the conclusion that more girls
> got the question wrong than took the test, should act as reality
> checks, telling you something is wrong with your method. Applying
> some reality checks to my little equation:
>> if all girls knew, P1 = 1.0 and the composite score is 100.
> if all girls knew wrong, P2 = 1.0 and the composite score is 0.
> if all girls just guessed, P3 = 1.0 and the composite score is 20.
>>> You assume p3 = 1, which incorrectly penalizes not only the girls who
> knew the right answer, but even the girls who knew the wrong answer,
> giving the former population less than their correct score of 100 for the
> question, and the latter population less than their correct score of
zero.
>>> -- cary
Correct. Very good.
It's impossible to know *exactly* how many girls thought they knew the
answer,
and instead had the wrong answer (P2). But because so few got the correct
answer, it's a good educated guess that P1 can't be greater than 0.
In the example above where 14.9% of girls got the correct answer, we know
that 85.1% of them got the wrong answer, and that they did so by guessing
wrong. So based on this educated guess, P2 has to be 5.1%.
What this means is that no girls knew the correct answer [P1 = 0] and 5.1%
of them thought they knew the right answer but had the wrong answer [P2 =
5.1%].
It's possible but highly unlikely that P1 > 0, in which event we'd have to
subtract P1 from P2 to know exactly how many of them were this misinformed.
So the question is, Cary, why were American girls so misinformed about this
particular problem (and a whole host of other problems which had a similar
result)?
The way I see it, there are only three possibilities:
1) They learned the wrong thing in the classroom.
2) They were taught properly in the classroom, but relied on their
"intuition" rather than on what they were taught.
3) The error in the test is greater than 3% (like around 5%).
Based on the repeatability of the test, and its relative consistency with
other tests given by different organizations, I believe that their estimate
of a 3% error is very conservative [read: too high].
If they were taught the wrong thing in the classroom, then why did boys, who
scored 27.2%, get taught the right thing? Of course it's possible that they
too were taught the wrong thing, then realized during the test that what
they were taught was in error, and adjusted their answer accordingly. Of
course, if this is true, still far too many of American boys got it wrong to
believe they were even taught this at all, particularly since 60% of Swedish
boys got it right.
And that leaves only one possibility: women's intuition. The way the
collective feminazi mentality on this forum always manages to produce
exactly the *wrong* answer is a great demonstration of what happens when
women rely on "women's intuition" rather than facts.
And this is a cut and dried FACT. Feminazis simply can't dispute it.
American girls got a much lower score than if they'd just guessed, whereas
most girls in other countries scored higher than if they'd just guessed,
with Australian girls scoring higher than American boys.
"Sexist"? Do American girls enjoy the worldwide reputation as the Anchormen
of Intellect, or would even one of these feminazis want to get to the source
of the problem?
My bet is that feminazis are too stupid and arrogant to even understand,
much less care.
John Knight
